Laudator Temporis Acti

Joshua Whatmough, Poetic, Scientific and other Forms of Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956 = Sather Classical Lectures, 29), pp. 201-202:

What I do decline is to occupy myself for one moment with such trivialities as the place of Vergil's birth, a paltry and meaningless problem over which humanists so prominent as Rand and Conway between them spent nearly four whole years; with the contradictory, i.e., false, assertion of single authorship of the Iliad; with quibbles such as that about the authorship of the Satyricon of Petronius, or about the authenticity of the epistles attributed to Plato—both of which have been debated, without finality, for centuries. This flogging of dead horses, this threshing of old straw, and all of it in the name of humanism, is a betrayal of the cause of humanism, or, at best, indifference to it. If this seems like intolerance, the reason is precisely that I am not indifferent to the frittering away of intellectual endeavor upon these idle and vapid problems.